From The New Yorker: “Cecil Taylor and the Art of Noise”
Rea Irvin
April 10, 2018
Alex Ross
Cecil Taylor
In 1993, I briefly met the composer György Ligeti, one of the towering figures of the past hundred years of music. As often happens when one is in the company of greats, I seized the opportunity to ask an idiotic question: “What do you think of Cecil Taylor?” Ligeti possessed a comprehensive knowledge of the world’s musical traditions, including jazz. But he had little more than a vaguely positive impression of Taylor. I failed to hit whatever interpretive jackpot I had been expecting.
Ligeti died in 2006, at the age of eighty-three. Taylor died last week, at eighty-nine. In truth, the two had little in common, other than a propensity for seething, maximalist textures. What united them in my mind was how they guided me as brilliant beacons at a time when I was discovering the full extent of twentieth-century musical possibility. We tend to think of genres as distinct land masses, with oceans of taste separating them. Yet, as I observed when I wrote about Taylor and Sonic Youth, in 1998, there exist polar regions where the distinctions tend to blur—namely, the zone that is often labelled “avant” or “experimental” in used-record stores. When dissonance and complexity build to a sufficient degree, works of classical, jazz, or rock descent can sound more like one another than like their parent genres.
I grew up with classical music and came late to rock, pop, and jazz. I took the northern passage between genres, and Taylor was, somewhat perversely, the first jazz figure who caught my ear—perversely because he had only one foot in jazz, as conventionally defined. The pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, commenting on a 1973 trio recording, writes that Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille, Taylor’s partners on this occasion, “sound like jazz musicians.” Taylor, however, “didn’t sound like that. He had another kind of poetry, some other kind of sheer strength of will.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody observes that, even on the début album Jazz Advance, from 1956, Taylor had “left chordal jazz behind and spun musical material of his own choosing (whether harmonic, motivic, melodic, or rhythmic) into kaleidoscopic cascades of sound.” The question of whether Taylor was “really jazz” was once a hot topic in the jazz world, and he elicited a few sharp putdowns from fellow-musicians. “Total self-indulgent bullshit” was Branford Marsalis’s notorious judgment on Taylor’s modernist philosophy in the Ken Burns documentary “Jazz.” Miles Davis said, of a Taylor record, “Take it off! That’s some sad shit, man.” Such is the fate of the outsider in any genre.
For me, Taylor was the untouchable emperor of the art of noise. I first saw him in 1989, at the Western Front, a club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also on the bill was the David Gilmore Trio; Marvin Gilmore, Jr., David Gilmore’s father, owned the club, which was best known for its reggae nights. Several shaggy-haired patrons audibly expressed their bewilderment as the performance unfolded; it turned out that they had come expecting to hear David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd. I don’t remember much in detail about Taylor’s set, in which he was joined by William Parker, on bass, and Gregg Bendian, on drums. I do recall that for the first five or ten minutes the music was dense, intense, driving, ferocious—and then it started. Some frenzy of figuration under Taylor’s hummingbird hands set off a collective pandemonium that became purely physical in effect: I felt at once pressed backward and pulled in. It remains one of the most visceral listening experiences of my life.
Taylor always shunned labels. He often used “jazz” in virtual quotation marks, even though he recognized it as his home tradition. He was also wary of the word “composer.” A graduate of the New England Conservatory, he was rigorously trained in classical composition and performance, and could fire off precise references to Webern, Xenakis, and, yes, Ligeti. But he disliked the idea of the composer as a mastermind controlling every aspect of music behind the scenes. In 1989, Steve Lake wrote, of Taylor: “In a dismissive tone, he can make ‘composer’ sound like ‘dictator’ or ‘megalomaniac.’ ‘I don’t think I’d ever want to be considered a composer’ (accompanying the word with an expression of acute distaste).” In this Taylor was akin to his idol, Duke Ellington, who resisted European archetypes of composition and sought to create his own jazz-based African-American version of it. Ellington and Taylor were vastly different: the one suave, aristocratic, buoyant, popular; the other irregular, anarchic, confrontational, anti-commercial. But Taylor emulated Ellington’s way of composing with and through his groups. Taylor would give his collaborators notated material, yet they had the freedom to express themselves through the written notes or abandon them altogether.
Taylor could indeed create atonal music on the fly, as if he were improvising a Charles Ives sonata or a Stockhausen Klavierstück. At his most diabolical, he sounds like several of Conlon Nancarrow’s hyperkinetic player-piano rolls playing simultaneously. Those splatters of notes are hardly random, however. He pummels the piano in different registers and then repeats the gesture with startling precision. His hands always go where his brain directs them to go. And he would return to tonal groundings after long spells in a gravity-free environment. Something I particularly loved about his recordings and performances—I saw him a handful of times in the nineties and the aughts—were the grand, mournful, minor-mode themes that would periodically loom out of the harmonic fog. They struck me as fundamentally Romantic in contour—perhaps a bit Brahmsian, for lack of a better point of reference. I have stitched together a few of them, from 3 Phasis, Winged Serpent, and Alms / Tiergarten (Spree), which you can listen to here.
The last example comes from a set of eleven CDs released by the Free Music Production label, documenting Taylor’s residency in Berlin in the summer of 1988. Alms, a two-hour marathon featuring a seventeen-piece group called the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra, included such avant-jazz luminaries as Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, and Han Bennink. The music moves in like a weather system, a slow-gathering, all-engulfing storm of sound. On the FMP recording, the orchestra is plainly working from a score and periodically settles on a particular figure, though crisp unisons are not the point. (Taylor himself often ignores the big patterns he has set in motion and dances deliriously against the grain.) I witnessed the same mighty convergence at a live show at Iridium, in 2005, with a fifteen-piece band. As the music swayed between quasi-symphonic utterances and every-which-way melees, it presented a totality, a sprawling structure built in real time.
As Iverson says, no one else played like Taylor, and no one will. Nonetheless, he leaves a potent legacy for the ever-growing body of music that unfolds in the spaces between jazz and classical traditions, between European and African-American cultures, between composition and improvisation. With Taylor, the refusal of category, the resistance to description, was rooted in an attitude of defiance that seemed variously personal, cultural, and political. At a famously contentious discussion at Bennington College in 1964, Taylor said: “The jazz musician has taken Western music and made of it what he wanted to make of it.” As a queer black man—he rejected the label “gay”—he experienced racism in the wider world and homophobia within jazz. As the purveyor of music that most people found incomprehensible, he encountered a disdain that frequently boiled over into irrational hatred. His imperious indifference followed the example of the European masters who looked nothing like him, and whose company he joins.
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